that he borrowed it from “moral Gower”. In Chaucer, a bachelor of the royal household is condemned to lose his life for committing rape. The queen intercedes for him, and the king leaves his life at her disposal. She tells the knight that he will be pardoned if he answer the question, “What does woman most desire?” The loathly lady is a benevolent fairy who had assumed a hideous form to test the knight’s fidelity to his word, and save his life. In Gower she is the daughter of the King of Sicily metamorphosed by a spiteful stepmother. In most of the versions the loathly lady is a king’s daughter. The solution of the question is peculiar to Chaucer, Gower, and the two ballads of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall. In most of the other versions the loathly lady seeks admission, which is reluctantly granted, then to be allowed to lie beside the king, or knight; but, in the Grim’s Saga, she makes it the condition of saving the hero’s life, by curing his desperate wounds, that he should kiss her. Her appearance is thus described by Gower: Her nose low, or flat, her brow high; eyes small and deep-set; cheeks, wet with tears, shrivelled and hanging down to her chin; lips, shrunken with age; forehead narrow; locks hoary; neck, short; shoulders, bent; in brief, all her limbs and features distorted. In the ballad of “The Marriage of Sir Gawain” (Percy Folio MS., ed. Hales and Furnivall, vol. i), her portrait is thus limned:
“Then there as shold have been her mouth,
Then there was sett her eye;
The other was in her forehead fast,
The way that she might see.
“Her nose was crooked and turned outward,
Her mouth stood all a-wry;
A worse formed lady than shee was
Never man saw with his eye.”
Nor does the author of the Border ballad of “King Henrie” spare the details:
